In August 2017, hundreds of white supremacists descended on

Charlottesville, Virginia, for a violent rally that killed one woman and injured
at least 19 others. They bore images and chanted slogans that evoked Nazi
Germany, the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan. But they also carried
symbols from an even older time—symbols whose origin they did not seem
to understand.

One man carried a round shield decorated with a black eagle. It was a
curious choice, considering the eagle image is strongly associated with a
Saint Maurice, a Roman general of African descent who became a saint in
the early Middle Ages.

“Nazis aren’t very happy that I keep posting the *original* medieval
European bearer of this standard, Saint Maurice,” tweeted Malisha Dewalt,
who runs a blog about people of color in European art history. In that tweet,
she attached a side-by-side comparison of the man in Charlottesville holding
his shield and Saint Maurice holding a flag with the same eagle on it.

medievalpoc@medievalpoc
Nazis aren't very happy that I keep posting the *original* medieval European
bearer of this standard, Saint Maurice (right):
28.1K

5:47 PM - Aug 14, 2017

13.8K people are talking about this

The white supremacist in Charlottesville carrying that image was probably
unaware that it’s strongly associated with a black Catholic saint, and this
disconnect illustrates a larger trend. Hate groups that adopt medieval
iconography as symbols of white supremacy usually have misconceptions
about that historical era. One of the most common? That Europe in the
Middle Ages was unvaryingly white.
“The understanding of medieval Europe as a homogeneously white space is
completely erroneous, as scholar after scholar has shown time and time
again,” says Cord J. Whitaker, a medieval literature professor at Wellesley
College who is writing a book called Black Metaphors: Race, Rhetoric,
Religion, and the Literature of the Late Middle Ages.

Recent work by archaeologists and anthropologists “shows beyond a

shadow of a doubt, Northern Europe in the Late Middle Ages—even the
Middle Ages generally—was an incredibly diverse space,” he says. In 2015,
when researchers at the Museum of London analyzed the skeletons of four
people who lived in Roman London between the first and fifth centuries,
their groundbreaking investigation found that one of them had Near Eastern
ancestry, and another was likely born in North Africa. In a 2013 roundtable
interview for NPR, art historians also noted that medieval art is more racially
and ethnically diverse than many people assume.

So if medieval Europe wasn’t really an all-white space, why do so many

people think it was?

“Much of that misconception comes from modern popular treatments of the

Middle Ages, really beginning in the Enlightenment,” Whitaker says. Many
non-white figures in medieval art were either ignored or physically edited
out of the picture. And popular 19th-century novels that focused on
medieval Europe portrayed it as a primarily white place.

“Many of those 19th-century texts were bound up with modern British and
other European forms of colonialism and imperialism,” he says. “They’re very
much bound up with naturalizing the idea that Europe is an ancestral
homeland for Europeans, that it was homogeneously European in heritage,
and that it should have power over the rest of the world.”

A man from an alt-right group carrying a flag with the othala rune before
Virginia State Police ordered the evacuation by all parties and cancellation of
the “Unite The Right” rally scheduled to take place in Emancipation Park,
Charlottesville, Virginia, 2017. (Credit: Albin Lohr-Jones/Pacific Press) ***
Please Use Credit from Credit Field ***(Sipa via AP Images)
Which is not unlike when modern hate groups link medieval images to white
supremacy. As an example, Whitaker points to the othala rune. This symbol
—which looks a bit like a fish pointed upward—was originally just a letter in
a medieval runic alphabet. But in the early 20th century, Nazis took it up as a
symbol of white supremacy. Last year, the National Socialist Movement, an
American neo-Nazi group, replaced the swastikas on its uniforms and
banners with the rune. The Anti-Defamation League lists it as a hate symbol.

“This is something that’s very much in keeping with the legacy of the 18th
and 19th centuries, which was the height of European imperialism around
the world,” Whitaker says. When neo-Nazis display the othala rune, they’re
evoking the idea that Europe is the “ancestral homeland” of white people
like them—and no one else.

Whitaker recently discussed white supremacists’ use of medieval icons at a

symposium called “The Crusades, the Middle Ages, and the Alt Right.” The
symposium was organized by Matthew Gabriele, a professor of medieval
and early modern studies at Virginia Tech, who says historians need to
address hate groups’ use of medieval iconography. Often, this imagery
comes from the Crusades.

He saw it in footage of the Charlottesville rally, he says: “The imagery that

these white nationalist, white supremacist groups were using was really in a
lot of cases very noticeably medieval.” Some of them carried “crusader
shields with a red cross on it that said ‘deus vult’”—a Latin rallying cry
meaning “God wills,” used by some Christian knights in the first Crusade. The
red crosses evoke those worn by the Knights Templar, a Roman Catholic
order that has long been fodder for myth, legend and conspiracy theories.

Hate groups’ attempts to link modern Islamophobia to the Crusades plays

off of “a much older, 19th-century style of scholarship which portrayed the
Crusades in a very specific way,” Gabriele says. This older scholarship
framed the Crusades as a “Christian defensive war against an aggressive,
expansionistic Islam.” Hate groups use this narrative of the Crusades to say,
as Gabriele puts it, “‘Look what happened then; it’s happening again now.’”

Only it’s not happening now; and it didn’t happen that way then, either,
scholars say. As Suleiman A. Mourad, a professor of religion at Smith College
who spoke spoke at the symposium, points out, the Crusades weren’t just a
series of wars between Muslims and Christians for the Holy Land. Rather,
they consisted of multiple factions vying for control.

“Every story is complicated, and every story has multiple narratives,” he says.
“If we simplify them, we are ignoring and sidelining important details.”

But the fact that hate groups use medieval symbols out of context isn’t the
only reason historians should be troubled, says Susanna A. Throop, a
professor of medieval history at Ursinus College who spoke at the
symposium, too. They should also be concerned with “how history, which is
a product of historians’ work, is being deployed to promote a specific vision
of the future,” she says.

Because even if medieval Europe were homogeneously white, and even if

the Crusades were really just as simple as Christians versus Muslims, that
still wouldn’t justify racial or religious genocide. “History can and should
inform our ethics, but it doesn’t determine them,” she says. “And the
relationship between history and our present ethical decisions is not always
simple and straightforward.”

n January this year, at a courthouse in Wichita, Kansas, three members of a right-wing

militia group were sentenced to a combined total of 81 years in jail for plotting the mass
murder of Muslims on American soil.

During the 2016 presidential election campaign, the men – convinced that they had a duty to
prevent the American government from ‘selling this country out’ – had stockpiled weapons
and attempted to manufacture or buy explosives. And they had picked their target: an
apartment complex in Garden City housing Somalian Muslim refugees.

Their plans were foiled by FBI agents, who infiltrated the group and bugged their
communications, recording them making detailed plans to detonate car bombs. The plotters
discussed the possibility of shooting Muslim people with arrows dipped in pigs’ blood, and
they referred to Muslim immigrants and refugees as cockroaches.

The group’s ethos was anti-government, nationalist, and anti-Islamic. In a four-page

manifesto scrawled in black, blue and green ink on a spiral-bound notepad they claimed
they were ready to rescue the Constitution and prevent the government from ‘illegally
bringing in Muslims by the thousands.’ And in case any doubt remained about their feelings
toward Muslims in the United States, they called themselves ‘The Crusaders’.

The crusades – the long series of wars fought between 1096 and 1492 under the direction of
medieval popes against a wide range of enemies of many different faiths, including Sunni
and Shia Muslims – have long been fascinating to the extreme right wing, both in the United
States and elsewhere.

The square-limbed crusader cross, often accompanied by the Latin phrase Deus Vult (God
Wills It – a catchphrase shouted by warriors during the First Crusade in 1095 -1099AD) is a
symbol often spotted on white supremacist marches. Crusader memes, such as an image of a
Knight Templar accompanied by the caption ‘I’ll see your jihad and raise you one crusade’,
are popular on hard-right talk-boards and Facebook pages. The masthead of the prominent
white supremacist website The Daily Stormer features a cartoon image of a crusader knight
and the phrase Deus Vult.

Crusader iconography and the language of crusading is usually rolled together with other
right-wing tropes and generic threats of violence against non-whites and women. Last
month, for example, the FBI arrested 35-year old Eric Lin in Seattle, WA, on charges of
sending dozens of racist and threatening Facebook messages to a woman in Miami, in which
Lin invoked the authority of Adolf Hitler, promised to cut out the woman’s heart and eat it,
called for the death of all Hispanic people and said he thanked God that “President Donald
John Trump is President and he will launch a Racial War and Crusade” in which black
people, Hispanics and Muslims would be sent to concentration camps.

Sometimes, the crusading rhetoric of online cranks and neo-Nazis is translated into deadly
action. Nowhere has this been more chillingly demonstrated recently than in New Zealand,
where on March 15th this year a lone gunman murdered more than forty people worshiping
at mosques in Christchurch. The assault rifles and automatic shotguns used to carry out his
crimes were daubed with the references to crusader battles dating back to the twelfth
century AD and the names of crusader warriors including the medieval lord Bohemond of
Taranto, prince of Antioch.

In a manifesto explaining his actions, which was emailed to recipients including New
Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, the killer called his crimes ‘revenge against Islam
for 1,300 years of war and devastation that it has brought upon the people of the West. He
quoted Urban II, the first pope to preach a crusade, in 1095, and wrote in block capitals:
“ASK YOURSELF, WHAT WOULD POPE URBAN DO?”

In harking back repeatedly to the crusading era, the angry young men of the white
supremacist far right mirror the language often used by Islamist extremists and ISIS
fighters, who glorify suicide bombings and other terror attacks on westerners and Christians
(such as the Sri Lanka church bombings of Easter Sunday this year) as strikes against
“citizens of the crusader coalition.” Both groups remember with barely concealed glee the
unfortunate moment on September 16th 2001 when President George W. Bush stood on the
White House lawn and told reporters that “this crusade, this war against terrorism, is going
to take a while.”

Fifty pairs of shoes lay outside the All Souls Church representing the 50 people gunned down at the two
mosques in Christchurch on March 19, 2019.

It is easy to see why. The crusades have immense propaganda value to anyone who wishes
to suggest that the Islamic world and the Christian West are engaged in a permanent
civilizational war dating back a thousand years or more, from which there is no escape and
in which there can only be one victor.
Superficially, at least, it is possible to read the history of the medieval crusades in such a
way. In 1095-6 Pope Urban sent the first crusader armies out of western Europe with the
twin aims of attacking Muslim warlords were at war the Christian Byzantine emperor in
Constantinople, then seizing Jerusalem from its Islamic rulers, loyal to the Shi’ite caliph in
Cairo. From the 1090s until the 1290s, territorial wars were thereafter waged against a
variety of Muslim rulers in Syria, Palestine and Egypt.

At the same time, a second theatre of warfare saw clashes between Christian rulers of the
petty medieval kingdoms of Spain and Portugal do battle with a variety of Islamic rulers in
the southern Spanish region known as al-Andalus: this was the Reconquista, which ran until
1492, when Granada, the last Muslim stronghold on mainland Spain, surrendered to the
“Catholic monarchs” Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile.

Later, from the fourteenth century onwards, Christian rulers and crusading military
organizations did battle with armies of the Ottoman empire across the Mediterranean and
into eastern Europe and the Balkans. (This is one reason why the anti-Islamic fascist
rhetoric is particularly prevalent today in countries like Serbia and Hungary.)

In other words, the medieval crusades did indeed contain a clear spine of conflict between
Christian and Islamic powers. It is also true that at certain times, these wars were essentially
spiritual: that is to say, making war on unbelievers, either through the crusade or its Islamic
equivalent, the jihad, was an end in itself. Yet we do not have to look very far at all to
realize that the story is rather more complex than it appears.

For a start, medieval crusades were by no means exclusively fought against Muslims. One
of the busiest regions of crusading was in fact the Baltic, where for centuries armies wearing
crusader crosses fought against pagans in modern Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In
the south of France there was a long crusade in the thirteenth century against heretics known
as Cathars (the ‘Albigensian crusade’).

In 1204, during the ill-fated Fourth Crusade, a French and Venetian fleet disgorged an army
which laid siege to Constantinople, slaughtering and robbing Greek Christians and burning
hundreds of acres of the greatest city in eastern Christendom to the ground. And after the
papacy of Innocent III (1198-1216) popes began to use the crusade as a blunt political
instrument against their allies, launching crusades against Christian rulers up to and
including Holy Roman Emperors – supposedly the secular defender of Christendom in the
west.

Into this more nuanced picture, historians will also point out that crusader armies were not
exclusively staffed with Christian soldiers. In the Holy Land, Muslim mercenaries such as
the light cavalry known as turcopoles were often happy to fight alongside Christians. In
1244, one of the most important battles of the entire crusading period was fought between
the sultan of Egypt and an alliance of crusader knights and Islamic forces from the cities of
Homs, Aleppo and Kerak. (The crusaders and their allies suffered a crushing defeat.)

Finally, for all that modern zealots like to paint the crusades as a period of mutual hostility
between Christians and Muslims, the truth is that the story was more often one of co-
operation, trade and co-existence between people of different faiths and backgrounds. A
staple of modern crusader memes is the image of a Templar knight preparing to make
righteous war on non-Christian unbelievers. Yet the great Syrian soldier-poet Usama ibn
Munqidh (d.1188) wrote of the Templars in warm and friendly terms, recounting that when
he visited crusader Jerusalem the Templars in their global headquarters would clear out one
of their chapels to allow him to pray towards Mecca.

None of this nuanced history tends to appear in the manifestos of terrorists, or would-be car-
bombers. They are content, alas, to perpetuate an idea of the crusades that is binary and
zero-sum: an us-or-them narrative designed to justify hatred, racist vitriol, violence and even
murder. The medieval crusades were a largely dreadful misdirection of religious enthusiasm
towards painful and bloody ends. They were neither a glorious clash of civilizations, nor a
model for the world as it is today.